Photo: Michael Bulbenko

DeviousstanDarDs

Jamy Ian Swiss

Hermetic Press, inc.Seattle, Washington

Contents

ix Foreword—Roberto Giobbi

1 The Method Is Not the Trick

21 Martin Nash

29 Discovering Importance

47 Empathy

73 Derek Dingle—Times Remembered, Times Past

95 A Dissertation on the Double Lift

133 Bob Read

145 The JS Rules of Magic

187 The Last Layman

201 Billy McComb—The Hippest Guy in the Room

31

Discovering imPortance

Don’t make unimportant things important.—Dai Vernon

I am fonD of epigrams. These nuggets of wisdom are use-ful tools for expressing big ideas in small packages. Such wheels need not be reinvented each time we need to take a ride on the great ideas of magic. If someone has expressed an idea better than I might have, it bears repeating—and I often do.

In quoting such pithy jewels—frequently from sources like the sagacious Erdnase and the sage Al Baker—I am always aware that I am often quoting Dai Vernon. Vernon was fond of such aphorisms, and peppered his conversa-tions with them throughout his life. In Dai Vernon’s Expanded Lecture Notes1 you can read Jay Marshall’s notes from a 1968 Vernon lecture in which Vernon says, “Details make for perfection, but perfection is no detail”;2 and you can hear Vernon repeat it in 1982 on the Revelations videos. In the Expanded Lecture Notes, Marshall also provided notes from a 1965 lecture in which Vernon offered that “Confu-sion is not magic,” a pet phrase, apparently of Vernon’s own coinage. He spent his life accumulating such gems.

32 Devious

Standards

I have often quoted these phrases, which I learned from Vernon’s body of work—his literature, audio recordings, video recordings, live appearances, and my own one-on-one contact with him late in his life.3 The one time I saw Vernon lecture in 1978,4 he gave away photos and his “spinner” coins to people who could identify the sources of some of his other favorite maxims, or who could quote them; as when he asked, “What does Erdnase name as the required sleights for ‘The Traveling Cards’?” (AKA “The Cards Up the Sleeve.”)5 And it was Vernon who pointed me to some of those marvelous Al Baker adages, which today are often mistakenly credited to the Professor (although he always provided appropriate attribution), including one of his true favorites, “Magicians stop think-ing too soon.” As a man who never stopped thinking—and basically didn’t believe that any idea was ever sufficiently finished as to be perfect—it is understandable why he would have found that statement so meaningful.

Among the list of Vernon dicta I have frequently quoted is this: “Don’t make unimportant things important.” To me, this statement speaks to a principal and insightful idea. Recently, I began to think about this phrase more and more, and concluded that it might be worthy of a writ-ten discourse—like this essay—and so I began to research it, as I had always assumed it was a core Vernonism, com-monly known to his many followers. And then, much to my surprise, matters began to take an unexpected turn. Nobody else knew the phrase. It was new to every Vernon adherent whom I approached.6

33Discovering

Importance

Virtually everyone agreed it sounded like the kind of thing Vernon might say—or Baker, for that matter. And we discussed examples of what the statement might be trying to capture. But no one else knew the phrase. So now I had a minor mystery on my hands.

I searched the Vernon oeuvre, from lecture notes to the early manuscripts, to the Ganson books, the Vernon Chron-icles, and He Fooled Houdini, the closest thing we have to a Vernon autobiography. I7 searched through the Revelations videos and those made by Tony Delap, and the twenty-two years of “The Vernon Touch,” his column in Genii.

And there was simply no sign of it.I am certain I heard Vernon say the phrase. It is filed in

my mind like a Vernonism, a dictum, and thus something I either would have read—which apparently I did not—or would have heard him speak as a public (rather than pri-vate) pronouncement, that I then immediately assumed to be part of the Vernon canon. My best guess is that I heard him say it at that 1978 lecture, apparently off the cuff.8 And ever since that night, I have returned to this phrase, studied it, used it, and repeated it.

So much to my surprise, it now appears that rather than reconsidering a thing widely known, what I have on my hands is an archaeological artifact, a stone I overturned that, rather than being commonplace, turns out to have remained unseen all this time. I’m glad to bring my little treasure out into the light of day and give it to you, that you may enjoy it, and that we may all savor it over time.

Don’t make unimportant things important.

34 Devious

Standards

What does it mean?It could mean, “remove the extraneous and unneces-

sary.” It could refer to what another past master, Ascanio, called the “anti-contrasting parenthesis,” unneeded ele-ments that distract from the clarity of a magical effect.

But I don’t think so. I think it’s about an idea both more subtle and more important. To eliminate the unnecessary is obvious. It’s about editing. And yes, Vernon believed in that—believed in simplicity. Vernon’s minimalism is some-times difficult to understand at first, because he was willing to go to great effort to achieve that simplicity. Al Baker said, “The simplest method is the best.” But he never said the easiest method is the best. For Vernon, the simplest method might be the Classic Pass—but it is far from the easiest. For Vernon, simplicity required great effort, great focus, great clarity of thinking. But I don’t think that’s what he meant when I heard him say, “Don’t make unim-portant things important.”

As magicians, we expend much time and energy on techniques and tools that remain invisible to the audience. That much is obvious; it is the nature of deception that much of our work will be concealed. But the danger of this focus is that our vision can become distorted. To fool laymen we need to be able to think like laymen—to imag-ine accurately what and how they will think. Without this ability, we can’t fool anyone, except possibly ourselves.

But to think like laymen we have to divorce ourselves from much of what we spend our time thinking about as magicians. To follow Vernon’s overarching mantra, “Be

35Discovering

Importance

natural,” we must learn to analyze and discover what naturalness really is to laymen. We have to analyze and then convert our devious intentions into the appearance of naturalism. It’s all so very complicated, really—and yet our thinking, and our technique, must be rendered not merely transparent, as in other arts—the brush strokes of a painter, the fingering of a musician—but in fact must be reduced to absolute invisibility. This is very difficult work. And it can often be confusing.

In our earliest days in magic, we find ourselves say-ing, “Here I have an ordinary pack of playing cards.” And this promptly leads to our first lesson in not making unim-portant things important: We are quickly corrected by our elders, and instructed that we must never say, “Here I have an ordinary pack of playing cards,” because this statement of the obvious is counterproductive to our pur-pose. Instead of proving innocence, it raises suspicion. Why? Because we have taken an unimportant thing—so unimportant that, left to their own devices, laymen will simply assume it to be true—and brought attention, and thereby suspicion, upon it. If we only allow the laymen to convince themselves—to fool themselves—they will. But we choose to get in the way. We do protest too much, methinks—and thus the play is ruined.

When my students write their first card trick script, they will often include something like “Now I will shuffle and cut the cards,” or “Now I will lose your card in the deck.” But invariably all this serves to accomplish is to bring unnecessary focus on a set of events that, unless

36 Devious

Standards

the shuffling is critically related to the core of the plot, should really be of no great importance. If we were sim-ply returning the card to the pack, and we weren’t doing anything sneaky, we wouldn’t comment further, because the action is obvious and self-explanatory. But since we magicians expend so much effort mastering our controls and false shuffles and the like, we distract ourselves, dis-tort our focus, and feel compelled to comment on our hard work. We make the unimportant seem important—to the detriment of the mystery we are trying to achieve.

A popular dealer item offers a version of the Bruno Hen-nig Card to Container (popularized by and often identified with Fred Kaps), in which a flap inside of a box creates the appearance of a folded card within. After you appar-ently discover the folded card in the box (and switch in the actual card via a Shuttle Pass), the gimmick allows you to show the box empty. And so, after you make the important climactic discovery of the card—“And is it your card? And is that your signature on it? Thank you very much!”—you then get to add, “And look—the box is empty!”

The gaff is ingenious, but it is an ingenious solution for a non-existent problem. And pointing out that a box once emptied actually remains empty is a quintessential exam-ple of making the unimportant important. As a wacky bonus, in the original versions of this gaffed prop, the flap did not lock. Therefore you got the chance to say, “And look, the box is empty—but you can’t touch it!” At least in the current iteration, the flap now locks—potentially a useful improvement.9

97

a Dissertation on tHe Double lift

There is probably no sleight in all card magic more abused than the double lift. The move is usually done in a forced, strained manner because the magician is afraid the two cards are going to separate. “A playing card,” Mr. Vernon says, “is a light and delicate object and should not be turned over like a cement block.”

—Dai Vernon’s “Ambitious Card” Stars of Magic

Dai Vernon used to tell a story about sitting around the magic shop in New York one afternoon—Holden’s, I’m guessing, in the 1930s—and the subject arose of how real people turn over the top card of a deck. Electing to turn speculation into research, Vernon and his cronies ven-tured out into the street and stopped random passersby, putting decks of cards into their hands and asking them to turn over the top card.

I have always enjoyed thinking about this anecdote—to begin with, just imagining the scene, and people’s reactions, with the researchers duly watching the card being turned,

98 Devious

Standards

then promptly retrieving the pack and, with a brief thank-you, proceeding to the next person.

It doesn’t appear that Vernon was inclined to draw any conclusion from the exercise; it merely added to his body of data, and to his thinking about Double Lifts in general, and about turning over cards.

However, I do believe some useful conclusions can be drawn from thinking about this experiment, and they inform my thinking about Double Lifts—both about those I use myself, and those I teach my students.

I believe that if you hand a pack of cards to ten differ-ent people who have virtually no experience with playing cards, you then might see close to ten different ways of turning over the top card of the pack. The question now becomes: What do we learn from this? What conclusion can we draw—if any—based on this information, when making choices about Double Lifts and how we turn over playing cards on the deck?

I believe this information tells us nothing useful whatso-ever. Because I don’t think we, as magicians, are attempting to imitate people who have virtually no experience handling playing cards. Even among those who choose to conceal their skill—a complex subject in itself, about which I will postpone discussion—few would maintain they are trying to appear completely unfamiliar with the props. Of those who avoid the distraction of open displays of skill that point more to method than to effect, most would likely agree that we should logically display the comfortable familiarity with a pack of cards possessed by the average social card-player.

99A Dissertation

on the Double Lift

After all, it is reasonable to assume that, as magicians, we handle the props on a regular basis; so it makes little sense to portray ourselves as awkward with them. The guy who plays poker with his buddies every couple of weeks tends to possess a modicum of skill, at the level, for example, of being able to execute a competent in-the -hands riffle shuf-fle followed by the standard waterfall flourish. It seems to me that even if we are trying to conceal our actual skill, this is a reasonable level of skill to portray.

Given this operating premise, I submit that, if we were to repeat Vernon’s street-side experiment, but hand the deck to ten card-players of typical skill level, ninety per-cent or more would turn over the top card in one of two ways: overhand stud-fashion or underhand stud-fashion. This is because card players are accustomed to turning over the top card of the deck and dealing it to the table for stud poker and similar applications.

Hence, my short answer to the question of what is the most natural way to turn over the top card of the pack—and therefore what amounts to the ideal a Double Lift should emulate—is the stud turnover.

Ah, but if only it were that simple.•

The Double Lift made its first published appearance in 1716 in The Merry Companion by William Neve. Ponsin described it again in 1853. The move, though, did not become popular, as with so many things, until Dai Vernon helped magicians to recognize the power of the sleight. It was not until Vernon came to New York in the 1910s and

100 Devious

Standards

began fooling colleagues with the Double Lift that magi-cians began to develop a fondness for the technique and bestow on it the ubiquity we now take for granted. In his “Vernon Touch” column in the March 1980 issue of Genii, Vernon wrote:

Theodore Annemann...coined the term Double Lift. This...much-abused move was first used by Cliff Green and yours truly in the year 1915 in New York City. It was this move and a short card that completely bewil-dered all the New York boys.

In a talk at the Los Angeles Conference on Magic His-tory in 2007, Richard Kaufman made the point that Vernon often provided simplified methods that put tricks requiring advanced sleight-of-hand within the reach of the average hobbyist. Thus, while Vernon is commonly identified with sophisticated sleight-of-hand magic, he also popularized techniques such as the Double Undercut and Double Lift, to serve as substitutes for more challenging traditional meth-ods (respectively, the Shift and the Top Change). Another example would be the Triumph Shuffle, which is a simplified version of the far more difficult strip-out shuffle. (Vernon actually used the latter when he performed the trick.1)

Over the years, Vernon contributed a number of approaches to the Double Lift, including the elegant and difficult “loose lifts” described in Volume One of The Ver-non Chronicles; but the most famous and significant is that described in his Ambitious Card routine in Stars of Magic, and subsequently by Lewis Ganson in The Dai Vernon Book

101A Dissertation

on the Double Lift

of Magic. Ganson’s description provides more finesse and detail, including a subtle way of obtaining the break. The reason Vernon fooled all the boys with his approach was that it contained none of the awful tells of traditional han-dlings; no struggling for the break, no awkward displays; all of which are still too often seen today. When a grown man has to take a card by the ends from the deck and rotate his hand palm up to display its face, I can only think that anyone over the age of seven should have better con-trol over his limbs.

Vernon’s handling was a far cry from such awkward and unnatural displays, although the details are often mis-understood, as is the role of the right hand. Even though that hand is used to carry the double toward the right, its presence is justified as aiding in squaring the deck just before the apparent push-off by the left thumb. The right hand then promptly releases the double, changing posi-tion for the turnover. If you pay attention to the details of Ganson’s description, the proper execution is made clear.

A final and very important point—to which we will return—is made at the conclusion of the chapter: “once the two cards (or even several cards) are flush with the pack and face up, they will stand the closest scrutiny.”

And so we see that Vernon, with his approach to the Double Lift, had several important goals. He made an effort to conceal the formation of the break; he tried to make the action look like a natural push-off of the top card; and he flipped over the double squarely onto the deck, tak-ing advantage of the safety of that final display position.